It took 21 years of waiting to implement the electronic identity card in Italy (CIE-carta d'identità elettronica italiana), but the traditional Italian bureaucracy caused 346.000 new documents, which are in the pockets of many citizens, to be issued incorrectly.
A resident of Randazzo, in the province of Enna, had problems at Fiumicino airport in Rome because his electronic document was not considered valid by airport security. This is according to a report received by the Ministry of the Interior.
Italy was the first country to introduce the electronic identity card across Europe, but the last to put it into practice — and even then it was wrong.
The bill has already arrived. To correct the error, the Ministry of the Interior had to send hundreds of thousands of letters to citizens who have defective documents.
Developed by Poligrafo di Stato, the only state company responsible for producing millions of documents throughout Italy, it defends itself by saying that creating an alarm in the country like this only generates an institutional conflict. “The date of issue is among the so-called secondary data”, says Paolo Aielli, director of the company.
To meet demand, the company doubled the machines in production from five to ten. However, the software has not been updated: on the card, the day of issue is correct, but on the chip, the technological heart of the new document, the date is 2015.
With information from Yahoo Finance
